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Science Quickly

Measuring the Strength of a Person's Gaze

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.41.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2018

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A new study suggests that, unconsciously, we actually do believe that looking exerts a slight force on the things being looked at. Karen Hopkin reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, Deadpool here. We're very excited to be joining you, but we should set the table correctly.

0:05.4

We're mostly going to make enemies with Disney and make a lot of jokes at Hughes' expense.

0:09.4

Come again.

0:10.4

So sit back, relax, while we travel to a place where grown men and women walk around in tights and act like it's not a giant cultural cry for help.

0:19.0

Because this is cinema. Shaggy! Oh my God! This is Cinema Cinema.

0:23.0

Sugar.

0:24.0

Oh my God.

0:25.0

Marvel Studios Deadpool in Wolverine in Cinemas Thursday, July 25th.

0:30.0

This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

0:36.3

You're at a party and you suddenly feel someone looking at you.

0:40.1

But how can it be possible to feel another person's gaze? I mean, it's not like people shoot

0:46.4

actual beams out of their eyes. Yet, a new study suggests that unconsciously, we actually do believe that looking exerts a slight force on the things being looked at.

0:58.0

That eye-opening finding appears in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

1:02.0

Vision depends on light entering the eye. the often express a belief in extra mission, the idea that the eyes emit a form of invisible energy.

1:16.0

To probe this perception, researchers at Princeton asked volunteers to look at a computer screen,

1:21.0

and gauge the angle at which a cardboard tube, shown being

1:25.2

slowly tilted on its side, would finally topple over. Now, in some of the tests, they

1:30.6

included an image of a young man watching the tube as it tilted toward him.

1:35.7

What the researchers found is that when there was someone staring at the tube, subjects thought

1:40.1

that the tube could tilt a little further before it toppled the fellow looking at it.

1:45.2

Which means that unconsciously, the volunteers must have imagined that the guy's gaze exerted

1:50.9

a slight force on the tube keeping it from falling.

...

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